Danish author who
published some 30 books: poems, novels, memoirs, essays, and
short stories. Tove Ditlevsen became one of the most widely read women
writers in Denmark. She was known for her direct style and honest
accounts of her private life. Ditlevsen enjoyed popularity from the
1940s until her tragic death in 1976.

Tove Ditlevsen was born in Copenhagen. She grew up in a
working-class neighborhood of Vesterbro, as the child of constantly
arguing and often impoverished parents. Her father, Ditlev N.
Ditlevsen, who was 37 when she was born, worked as a fireman. He was
class-conscious, voted for the Social Democratic Party, and read Gorky.
When he lost his job in 1924 during an economic downturn, the
family was forced to turn to the poor relief for a period. The
domineering figure of Ditlevsen's childhood was her mother, Alfrida
(née Mundus), ten years junior to her husband.

Throughout her career, Ditlevsen viewed herself foremost as a poet.
She began writing poems at the age of ten. After finishing school,
she worked at an office from 1932. Her first published poem, 'Til
mit døde barn,' about a mother speaking to her dead
child, appeared in the magazine Vild Hvede. It was included in her first book, Pigesind (1939). Ditlevsen first attracted attention in 1941 with her novel about child molestation, Man gjorde er barn fortæd
(A child was hurt). The central character, who suffers from a sexual
neurosis, forces herself to unearth herburied,
traumatic memories to be able reveal the identity of the culprit.
Noteworthy, Ditlevsen had not read Freud before writing the novel,
but basically the story portrays the mechanism underlying
psychoanalytic healing.

Family relationships and her own experiences were the focal point of Ditlevsen's work.
"Girls can't be poets," her father had once said.
Among her autobiographical books is the trilogy Barndom, Ungdom, Gift (1967-71), Vilhelms værelse (1975), and Tove DitlevsenOm mig selv (1975),
completed before her death on March 7, 1976. At the age of 58,
Ditlivsen committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping
pills.

In her writing, Ditlevsen dealt with erotic
problems, joy of love, marriage, and motherhood. Another central
theme is the effects of childhood experiences on adulthood; in her
youth, her friends at that time were mostly interested in sex and
stealing. In the poem 'Rain' she wrote: "Drunk men / are not dangerous
/ said my / girlfriend / child molesters / are always sober." (transl. by Cynthia Norris Graae, Canadian Woman Studies, Vol 8, No 2, 1987) Ditlevsen's background reflected in her formally traditional poems,
where the major theme was loneliness in the big city. Some of the poems in Den hemmelige rude (1961) interpreted the Grimms' Brothers Fairy Tales from a new an very personal perspective. Ditleven had owned a copy of the Brothers Grimm in her childhood.

Ditlevsen's first
three marriages (with Viggo F. Møller, Ebbe Munck, and Carl Theodor
Ryberg) in the 1940s did not bring her the happiness she expected.
Emotionally exhausted, she was hospitalized after the divorces.
Ditlevsen was twenty-two when she married Møller; he was thirty years
her senior, editor of the literary magazine Vild Hvede.
Ditlevsen, who felt that her husband did not pay enough attention to
her, had an affair with the poet Piet Hein. With Victor Andreasen, a
businessman and chief editor, whom she married in 1951, Ditlevsen had
her most enduring relationship although they separated in 1973.

All
of Ditlevsen's novels drew material from her difficult childhood,
failed marriages, and her experiences as a female writer and a drug
addict. From her third husband, who was a doctor, Ditlevsen received
Pethidine injections. She used this addictive, narcotic drug, for
years. Ansigterne
(1968, The Faces) was a psychological masterpiece, exploring the
psychosis of a woman, Lise Mundus, who is torn between her roles as
mother, wife, and writer. "We’ve found out what kind of person you are.
When you’re going to write a book, you go around looking at all kinds
of other books written by people who know their stuff. You steal a
sentence from every book and put them together like a puzzle, and then
you make people think that you’ve written every sentence yourself." (from The Faces, transl. by Tiina Nunnally) The partly autobiographical Vilhelms værelse
was about a destructive marriage. Blurring the line between fiction and
fact, the narrator and the protagonist, the work tells of events
leading to the suiduce of Lise Mundus. Kære Victor,
Victor Andreasen's correspondence with Ditlevsen, which was a
kind of commentary on the book, came out in 1993.

Ditlevsen's ruthlessly honest memoirs, Det tidlige forår
(1969, Early Spring), depicted her first eight years in a harsh
working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen during the depression. The
narrator, who is more innocent than other girls of her age, learns
about politics and unemployment, drunkenness and prostitution of the
adult world around her. "When we reach Gasværksvej, where we
usually turn around, Ruth says, 'Let's go down and look at the whores.
There are probably some who have started.' A whore is a woman who does
it for money, which seems to me much more understandable than to
do it for free. Ruth told me about it, and since I think the word is
ugly, I've found another in a book: 'Lady-of-the-evening'."(from Early Spring) The
work starts with the words "in the morning there was hope" and
culminates in the publication of her first book – but at the background
of this opening was a writer's block, which shadowed Ditlevsen's last
creative years. In a late poem, published in Det runde værelse
(1973), Ditlevsen compared herself with her cat, who was too old
to catch birds: "Ikke flere fugle at jage / ingen mus at skræmme. /
Ingen utvej af erindringens / labyrint. / Sagte rinder livet ud / som
dråber langs et nedløbsrør."